


Those You've Known

by musicaldork



Category: Herbert West - Reanimator - H. P. Lovecraft, Re-Animator (Movies)
Genre: Angst, Death, Emotional Constipation, Emotions, F/M, Gender-Neutral Pronouns, Grief/Mourning, Introspection, Loneliness, Loss, M/M, Musical References, Reader-Insert, gender neutral reader
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-21
Updated: 2020-06-21
Packaged: 2021-03-04 10:53:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,006
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24848578
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/musicaldork/pseuds/musicaldork
Summary: In the wake of your passing, Herbert West tries to adjust to his new normal - even if it feels anything but normal without you.
Relationships: Herbert West/Reader
Kudos: 8





	Those You've Known

**Author's Note:**

> Based off the song of the same name. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wlq_9JyBvC8  
> Highly recommend listening while reading, for the optimal reading experience.

Grief manifests itself in many different ways.

Herbert’s pain is a silent one within him.  
Tearless, but acute in its agony. It was blinding. A grief that refused to let up.

He takes your hand, cold in his.  
He doesn’t grab, he doesn’t squeeze. He just holds.

He holds it in his, and turns impossible thoughts about in his mind.

Maybe if he inspects them enough, he’ll make sense of these jagged, nonsensical fragments - understand the impossibility of you no longer being here with him.

Your fingers are stiff and unyielding beneath his own.

Clearly, rigor mortis has long since set in. Small doses of daily reagent to keep you viable for further testing have done nothing to make you seem any more alive.

At first, Herbert could pretend that you were just sleeping, that this was some kind of shaky, reagent-fuelled nightmare. That maybe he’d awake with a jolt at his desk and find his glasses knocked askew on his face, crawl into bed beside you and cling on tight to you.

That he could bury his face into your hair, inhale deeply and find himself home.

It’s been far too long since then. He can’t do that now, when you’re so cold and ashen, laid down against the cold steel of his examination table.

The stillness he finds around him is hateful.

The world keeps ticking on, like everything’s okay. It feels insulting to you, that everything is so much the same in your absence - when he feels like he’s crumbling apart himself.

The world simply relishes in its own cruel irreverence.

All the hours he spent working on his research instead of with you. How rarely it was for him to allow himself to be pulled into the light, however momentarily. Time he didn’t know he was wasting.

If he couldn’t bring you back, was there even a point to it all?

—

Nauseated by the prospect of another disaster and overwhelmed by reminders of Meg, Dan had soon stormed out of the house after discovering Herbert’s plan to reanimate you.

Their exchange was short, but still he felt the burden of it weighing him down.

Dan looked exhausted. Defeated, even.

_“Don’t.”_

The word filled the space between them, soft and so deeply weary - a weight in his words he’d never heard from him before in his life.

It was enough to stop Herbert in his tracks, faltering in his own defence.

“…but, just look at them. I… _have to_.”

His response was quiet and joyless, his voice pitchy with his own miserable petulance, like that of a child. But try as he might, he couldn’t meet Dan’s eyes as he spoke.

Wordlessly, Dan fixed him with a slow, pleading stare, before departing from the basement lab.

—

Dan left. Gruber left. You left.

Though the latter two were through no faults of your own, it still left him the same as he always was. Alone.

It’s him, isn’t it? He’s the common thread. It’s an uncomfortable realisation, something that he’s always known.

He knows it to be as true as anything else, though he always had the distraction to put off the introspection. It’s him - and because of the way he acts and the things he does, he is cursed surely to solitude. Not a person to be loved.

Working tirelessly to spite the line between makeshift gods and men, made one so much more acutely aware of their own mortality.

And as much as he tried to deny it - shackled to the imperfections of his own humanity - Herbert was just as much human as anybody else in the world.

Irrevocably so.  
He’s so completely and unmistakably human, that’s hard to know what to think sometimes.

But even so, he is alone.

As humans, we were never built to be alone.

—

Later that evening, he finds a small worn notebook on the bedside table of the bedroom you’d shared with him.

It feels strange to him to call it ‘his’ bedroom, when you were the one who spent most of your time there - too busy working to rely on sleep too frequently.

…You’re no longer there to share it, so he supposes it is solely his now.

The thought brings him no joy.

He finds that the only thing remarkable about the little book is that it has your name etched into the cover, penned in your handwriting, so distinctly you.

Steadiness is a virtue, but he can’t stop his hands from trembling as he opens up the pages.

The book is filled with sweet little notes about your day. Maybe a dream you’d scrawled down before you could forget, the lyrics to a few songs, a lovingly pressed flower or two.

He touches the pages like spun gold, afraid that if he looks at it too much, the words will disappear from under him.

Happy and bright, life was clearly relished between these pages, spilling out in a mockery of your sunshine.

Vibrant and truly alive, not simply surviving.

Everything in you that he had never had for himself.

He wants to throw the damned notebook halfway across the room, far away enough so that he stops feeling the words burning into his skin.

But he can’t bring himself to. His anger is solely for him, never you. And these pages are something connecting you to him, however tenuously. It’s too precious to tear.

So instead, he smooths his fingertips against the lightly textured grain of the paper and deftly tucks it away in a desk drawer to the left of him - to save for a rainy day.

—

_Those you’ve known and lost still walk behind you  
All alone, they linger till they find you  
Without them, the world grows dark around you  
And nothing is the same until you know that they have found you._

_Those you’ve pained may carry that still with them  
All the same, they whisper “all forgiven”  
Still your heart says their shadows bring the starlight  
And everything you’ve ever been is still there in the dark night._


End file.
